Tuesday, March 04, 2014

Miracle of mobiles delivers cued spaced-practice (ENCORE)

This tool (ENCORE) uses mobile devices to deliver cued spaced-practice
for learning. In my view, tools like this are a major breakthrough in learning technology,
as it is founded on a solid piece of psychological research and sound memory
theory.

Mobile learning
sceptic

I’ve always been a bit sceptical about the claims made for
mobile learning. I’m a mobile learner, as I don’t drive, so I take trains a
lot, but I don’t use a mobile phone for my mobile learning. In fact, I don’t
think I’ve even seen anyone do an e-learning course on the train. However, I am
a fan of using specific device affordances for learning. That’s why I’m fine
with tablets in primary schools but not in secondary or FE/HE for long form
writing, coding or using sophisticated tools. That’s where you need a notebook
or laptop.

Mobile affordances

For mobiles the affordances are around quick, episodic
events such as looking things up, quick experiences, learning games or alerts.
The average time someone spends on a mobile device is seconds, and it’s getting
shorter as txting on Whatsapp or whatever, overtakes voice. What seemed like a
suicidal price by Facebook, now looks like a steal considering the geographic
spread and ability to use Whatsapp for voice. Coming back to my point – we use
mobiles for short, episodic experiences.

Forgetting curve

For years I’ve been talking about the need to move learning
beyond the course in one specific way – repeated practice. It had become an
obsession. Finally I got a chance to implement htis through LearningPool. Ebbinhaus in 1885 gave us the forgetting curve, showing that most of
what we supposedly teach and learn is lost within minutes and hours. Learning
is therefore one of the most unproductive areas of human endeavour. The trick
is to look beyond the course and learning experience to the reinforcement of
that knowledge and skills. To truly move learning from working to long-term
memory we need to reinforce to increase retention and recall.

Miracle of mobiles

This has never really been possible in learning, as we lose
the students attention as soon as they walk out of the door. Suddenly a miracle
has happened, we all have the perfect device (well almost) – mobile phones.
These powerful, personal and portable devices that can deliver personalised
learning at anytime, anywhere to me alone. I mooted this idea with LearningPool
some time ago, and with their characteristic ‘can do’ attitude they’ve come up
with a tool that works – ENCORE.

Cues

ENCORE, takes the ‘cues’ from any course or learning
experience and spaced them out in whatever frequency you want after the course
to and end date. It may be up to the start of a new job, an exam, a product
launch, whatever. This word ‘cue’ is important. It is not a matter of replaying
the course but identifying key ‘cues’ like the handles of suitcases, so that the
brain uses these cues to pull out the suitcases of knowledge and skills.

Tulving has shown that Episodic memories
are encoded through cues that overlap the memories themselves. These cues allow
retrieval. The theory therefore explains memory failure, not so much in terms
of memory decay, as failure in retrieval. Research on cues and retrieval has
shown that context and physical environment do improve memory, encouraging the
view that learning should take place in the context in which it is likely to be
used. Semantic memories may be turned into episodic memories through loci and
peg systems. For examples historical sequences placed along a known route.Encoding is perhaps the one area of memory theory that
has the most direct impact on learning, as understanding encoding can led to
both better teaching and better learning. Tulving showed the importance of cues
and when learners make the effort to identify and note down cues they improve
retention (an obvious example is mnemonics). We now know the difference between
maintenance and elaborative encoding strategies. (Elaborative encoding leads to
deeper processing and therefore better learning.) We also know that the
organisation of learning is important in terms of relating new learning to previous
knowledge, emotional and context. All of this hold great promise when it comes
to the sophisticated use of cues and elaboration through mobile
spaced-practice.

Conclusion

My guess is as this develops significant increases in
retention and productivity will be realised.We can remind learners
about tasks, activities and push snippets of learning topics to them at timed
intervals. We can insert new life into previous learning with bite-size tasks and activities to
help refresh the learners’ mind. We canemphasise and fortify knowledge of
learning topics with catch up and repetitive learning and research shows clear
benefits in the thing that really matters retention.

1 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Donald,

I've been a fan of this blog for a number of years now, in particular of your iconoclastic attitude to some of the pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo that populates the training world. Peer-reviewed research all the way for me!

I'm about to commence designing some elearning material via Learning Pool. In the past I would have used Gagne as a starting point but I'm keen to keep it as fresh as possible. Do you know of any other models or approaches that would be of use?